Comic Talk and General Discussion

We may be decades away from eating meat that's been grown in a lab, but we should be starting to benefit from lab-grown skin in the very near future. Scientists at L'Oreal have invented a product called Episkin, which is basically a layer of skin cells grown from human “donor skin cells” in a Petri dish. These small amounts of skin can be used to test beauty products that would have otherwise been tested on animals. Episkin can tan, and can be made to “age” with high exposure to UV light.

The skin is being hailed as an important step in cruelty-free cosmetics, at least in Europe, where an animal beauty product-testing ban sets in 2009 (the practice is banned in the U.K. already). We'd like to think that lab-grown skin would be yet more useful: shouldn't Episkin be seen as an important step towards lab-grown (and therefore cruelty-free) pork crackling? ÃƒÂ¢Ã¯Â¿Â½Ã¯Â¿Â½ S.E. Kramer

LOL, or the people who goes: “Creating skin is just like cloning, omg!! its' totally against god…. I'd rather have inaccurate results that comes from force-feeding bunnies full of makeup products and poking things into their eyes!!”

I'm on hitatus while I redo one of my webcomics. Be sure to check it out when I'n done! :)

On a more serious note, unless it can be done cheaper than testing on bunnies, I don't look for this to be applied to very many labs. But the skin for burn victims is a good idea.

Not to derail this too far… but another good source of skin for burn victims might be from people who have had gastric bypass surgery and lost >100 pounds in a few months. Especially if we could make the operation free for them to donate.